The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur.

• Author: Shore, Stephanie
• Position: Book review

THE TRANSLATOR: A TRIBESMAN'S MEMOIR OF DARFUR

Daoud Hari

(New York: Random House, 2008), 204 pages.

In 2003, after years of looking for employment and months of rotting in an Egyptian jail, Daoud Hari decided to go back home to Darfur. He reached the village of his childhood just in time to flee from the Janjaweed helicopter gun-ships that turned his home into "ashes and graves."

Now as a refugee in Chad, Hari did what many fellow Zaghawa tribesmen did: resisted the Sudanese government-backed militia. Instead of joining a rebel group, he used his ability to speak English and sophisticated knowledge of the region to bring journalists and NGO workers into some of the most dangerous areas of Darfur.

In The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur, Daoud Hari brackets the complicated history of the Darfur conflict in the appendix and spends the bulk of the book regaling his reader with tales of his adventures with reporters who came "like cowboys...to clean up the land," and then wept for the dead, and the many people who shaped his personal journey during a country's destruction.

Hari's candid and unflinching insights into both the reporters covering the conflict and the citizens of Darfur allow...